Words on a page that might help me, or you, someday, maybe.

Followers

Today I passed 500 followers on this here blog, www.fillingmyblanks.com. That’s pretty cool. That’s really cool, in fact. It’s always been weird to me that there are people who subscribe to this thing that I do. I’ve been posting content on here every day for the last 28 months – that’s probably almost 1000 days or something – and to begin with nobody read it. To begin with it was just there, floating in the WordPress ether, and then I started tagging my posts so people could find them, and then I told my family about it, and then I started posting every blog on Twitter. And then I started getting followers, and last month I had 2084 views on this blog – from over 600 unique users.

500 people care about my life enough to want to read 500 words here or there about what I got up to on any given day. That means even more considering my life is pretty monotonous at the moment. I mean, I kind of got it when I was sharing photos of my travels every day for three months, but now I just write about how far I ran in a day and what I had for dinner. (0 miles, and steak stroganoff, for the record.)

I describe this thing to people who don’t understand it as ‘a diary that I don’t mind you reading’. That works pretty well, because I’m not writing it so that people will read it – it started as a personal project and has continued that way – but I’m also acutely aware of the fact that people do read it – my mum, my sisters, my boss, my Grandma, Alice’s Mum, Alice’s Nan, and four hundred and ninety three others. And that’s cool. That’s really cool.

As well as it being a tool to keep me writing something every day, for me the main attraction has always been the journalisation (which is a word that I’ve just made up – probably). I now have written documentation of the last two years, three months and 21 days of my life. I can track my progress and see where I’ve come from. I can see how I was feeling and what kind of person I was on any given day. And the fact that people want to read about it is just an added extra.